Almost all of the gradually dwindling Astartes had switched to their blades. It took too many bolter rounds to bring a megarachnid down. A blade was surer, provided one was quick enough to get the first stroke in, and strong enough to ensure that stroke was a killing blow.

It was with some surprise that Tarvitz discovered his fellow captain, Lucius, thought differenuy. As they pushed on, Lucius boasted that he was playing the enemy.

'It's like duelling with four swordsmen at once,' Lucius crowed. Lucius was a bladesman. To Tarvitz's knowledge, Lucius had never been bested in swordplay Where Tarvitz, and men like him, rotated through weapon drills to extend perfection in all forms and manners,

Lucius had made a single art of the sword. Frustratingly, his firearms skill was such that he never seemed to need to hone it on the ranges. It was Lucius's proudest claim to have 'personally worn out' four practice cages. Sometimes, the Legion's other sword-masters, warriors like Ekhelon and Brazenor, sparred with Lucius to improve their technique. It was said, Eidolon himself often chose Lucius as a training partner.

Lucius carried an antique long sword, a relic of the Unification Wars, forged in the smithies of the Urals by artisans of the Terrawatt Clan. It was a masterpiece of perfect balance and temper. Usually, he fought with it in the old style, with a combat shield locked to his left arm. The sword's wire-wound handle was unusually long, enabling him to change from a single to a double grip, to spin the blade one-handed like a baton, and to slide the pressure of his grip back and forth: back for a looping swing, forwards for a taut, focussed thrust.

He had his shield strapped across his back, and carried the megarachnid blade-limb in his left hand as a secondary sword. He had bound the base of the severed limb with strips of steel paper from the liner of his shield to prevent the edge from further harming his grip. Head low, he paced forwards through the endless avenues of stalks, hungry for any opportunity to deal death.

During the twelfth attack, Tarvitz witnessed Lucius at work for the first time. Lucius met a megarachnid head on, and set up a flurry of dazzling, ringing blows, his two blades against the creature's four. Tarvitz saw three opportunities for straight kill strokes that Lucius didn't so much miss as choose not to take. He was enjoying himself so much that he didn't want the game to end too soon.

'We will take one or two alive later.’ he told Tarvitz after the fight, without a hint of irony. 'I will chain them in the practice cages. They will be useful for sparring.’

They are xenos.’ Tarvitz scolded.

'If I am going to improve at all, I need decent practice. Practice mat will test me. Do you know of a man who could push me?'

They are xenos.’ Tarvitz said again.

'Perhaps it is the Emperor's will.’ Lucius suggested. 'Perhaps these things have been placed in the cosmos to improve our war skills.’

Tarvitz was proud that he didn't even begin to understand how xenos minds worked, but he was also confident that the purpose of the megarachnid, if they had some higher, ineffable purpose, was more than to give mankind a demanding training partner. He wondered, briefly, if they had language, or culture, culture as a man might recognise it. Art? Science? Emotion? Or were those things as seamlessly and exotically bonded into them as their technologies, so that mortal man might not differentiate or identify them?

Were they driven by some emotive cause to attack the Emperor's Children, or were they simply responding to trespass, like a mound of drone insects prodded with a stick? It occurred to him that the megarachnid might be attacking because, to them, the humans were hideous and xenos.

It was a terrible thought. Surely the megarachnid could see the superiority of the human design compared with their own? Maybe they fought because of jealousy?

Lucius was busy droning on, delightedly explaining some new finesse of wrist-turn that fighting the megarachnid had already taught him. He was demonstrating the technique against the bole of a stalk.

'See? A lift and turn. Lift and turn. The blow comes down and in. It would be of no purpose against a man, but here it is essential. I think I will compose a treatise on it. The move should be called "the Lucius", don't you think? How fine does that sound?'

Very fine.’ Tarvitz replied.

'Here is something!' a voice exclaimed over the vox. It was Sakian. They hurried to him. He had found a sudden and surprising clearing in the grass forest. The stalks had stopped, exposing a broad field of bare, red earth many kilometres square.

'What is this?' asked Bulle.

Tarvitz wondered if the space had been deliberately cleared, but there was no sign that stalks had ever sprouted there. The tall, swishing forest surrounded the area on all sides.

One by one, the Astartes stepped out into the open. It was unsettling. Moving through the grass forest, there had been precious little sense of going anywhere, because everywhere looked the same. This gap was suddenly a landmark. A disconcerting difference.

'Look here.’ Sakian called. He was twenty metres out in the barren plain, kneeling to examine something. Tarvitz realised he had called out because of something more specific than the change in environs.

'What is it?' Tarvitz asked, trudging forwards to join Sakian.

'I think I know, captain.’ Sakian replied, 'but I don't like to say it. I saw it here on the ground.’

Sakian held the object out so that Tarvitz could inspect it.

It was a vaguely triangular, vaguely concave piece of tinted glass, with rounded corners, roughly nine centimetres on its longest side. Its edges were lipped, and machine formed. Tarvitz knew what it was at once, because he was staring at it through two similar objects.

It was a visor lens from an Astartes helmet. What manner of force could have popped it out of its ceramite frame?

'It's what you think it is.’ Tarvitz told Sakian.

'Not one of ours.’

'No. I don't think so. The shape is wrong. This is Mark III.’

The Blood Angels, then?'

Yes. The Blood Angels.’ The first physical proof that anyone had been here before them.

'Look around!' Tarvitz ordered to the others. 'Search the dirt!'

The troop spent ten minutes searching. Nothing else was discovered. Overhead, an especially fierce shield-storm had begun to close in, as if drawn to them. Furious ripples of lightning striated the heavy clouds. The light grew yellow, and the storm's distortions whined and shrieked intrusively into their vox-links.

'We're exposed out here.’ Bulle muttered. 'Let's get back into the forest.’

Tarvitz was amused. Bulle made it sound as if the stalk thickets were safe ground.

Giant forks of lightning, savage and yellow-white phosphorescent, were searing down into the open space, explosively scorching the earth. Though each fork only existed for a nanosecond, they seemed solid and real, like fundamental, physical structures, like upturned, thorny trees. Three Astartes, including Lucius, were struck. Secure in their Mark IV plate, they shrugged off the massive, detonating impacts and laughed as aftershock electrical blooms crackled like garlands of blue wire around their armour for a few seconds.

'Bulle's right.’ Lucius said, his vox signal temporarily mauled by the discharge dissipating from his suit. 'I want to go back into the forest. I want to hunt. I haven't killed anything in twenty minutes.’

Several of the men around roared their approval at Lucius's wilfully belligerent pronouncement. They slapped their fists against their shields.

Tarvitz had been trying to contact Lord Eidolon again, or anyone else, but the storm was still blocking him. He

was concerned that the few of them still remaining should not separate, but Lucius's bravado had annoyed